Bryony Gordon discovers that cooking for the family at Christmas is
harder than mother made it seem.

On the occasion of my 30th birthday, my mother announced that I was to host Christmas. “That’s it,” she said, half exasperated, half relieved. “You’re old enough to cook a turkey now.” Perhaps it was because I was drunk at the time, or maybe it was because it was July, but I didn’t take her in the slightest bit seriously. The idea of my hosting Christmas seemed so ridiculous that I passed it off as a birthday joke; at Christmas, I am for ever a child, fully expecting, even at the age of 30, to be waited on hand and foot. But then, very suddenly, it was December, and my mother was asking if I had ordered a turkey.

I had no idea you had to order a turkey. I thought you could just show up at the supermarket and buy one for a couple of quid; but no, a turkey is like a designer dress, and you have to queue for it and spend a small fortune on it. Furthermore, nobody told me you had to remove the giblets, or that they buried the neck inside the turkey: I thought, that for 40 odd quid, somebody might do that for you.

At around 4pm on Christmas Day, as my father carved our lunch, I discovered that this was not the case.

At this point, my mother began to regret asking me to host Christmas. She described the turkey as “decimated”. I would have preferred the phrase “well done” (worried that it wouldn’t be ready in time, I had put it in the oven at seven in the morning; it was probably ready by 10am).

At 5pm, having attempted to eat the decimated turkey, and its giblets, I suddenly appreciated the idea of a “Christmas Day walk”. In all my hundreds of years on the planet, I have never understood the need for the “Christmas Day walk”: why leave a centrally heated house to go for a stroll, especially when you live in central London and the only scenery you take in is a Tesco Metro and a branch of Chicken Cottage? But it all became clear to me, as I hosted my first Christmas; I needed to get the hell out of the house and see something, anything, else, even if it was just Battersea Park Road.

At 6pm, my brother announced he was going to be sick. By the time the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special had started, I had followed suit. I wish I was making this up, but unfortunately that is not the case – I really did manage to poison my family. Given that I cooked my turkey, giblets and all, for almost 10 hours, I don’t know how this happened. But every cloud has a silver lining: I can bet that my mother will never ask me to host Christmas again.

I have a theory as to what actually made us ill: Christmas television. Is there anything worse than the dross schedulers stick on our screens over the festive period? Films you wouldn’t pay to watch at the cinema, repeats of programmes you never wanted to see in the first place, Christmas “specials” that the critics would lambast were they not in a festive mood. My television will remain firmly off until the middle of next month.

On Christmas Eve, as I did some last-minute present buying (OK, all my present buying), I spoke to a shop assistant who told me she had all of one day off, and that she had to stay until seven that night to get the Boxing Day sale ready (those who couldn’t wait until yesterday could have gone online on Christmas Day to get their bargains). That we can’t stop consuming even for 24 hours horrifies me, and sales make me feel miserable. Call me wasteful, but I would pay extra not to have to deal with the scrum of people buying absolutely anything just because there’s 30 per cent off.